Free Republic

The Old Right/New Left/Neo-Nazi AllianceBy Steven Zak FrontPageMagazine.com | May 12, 2005 How much difference is there, really, between the far-Left, the far-Right, and overt white supremacists? How do the public stances of Michael Moore, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke compare? Proponents of both extreme views now think and sound so much alike, they sound like soulmates. Somehow these fringe characters have moved so far around the edges that they have arrived at the same territory, spouting identical positions in copycat rhetoric on such issues as Iraq, the broader War on Terror, and the Jewish state of Israel. Their own words...

There were two valuable lessons I learned in the process of “outing” Helen Thomas as a hater ten years ago today. The first was the importance of making sure what a post is accurate because it can ruin someone’s career (what I posted was correct, and it ruined Ms. Thomas’ career). The other lesson is that mainstream media will do and say anything to protect one of their own. They protected her ten years ago, and many of them are still protecting her. Lid took down Helen Thomas. My “association” with Helen Thomas began Friday, June 4th, 2010, when a...

On the day after Earth Day's "March for Science," it seems appropriate to point to a column by University of Michigan History Professor Juan Cole in The Nation, a far-far-left publication considered a credible and authoritative go-to-source by the liberal intelligentsia. On April 18, Cole, echoing statements made during their final years by Barack Obama and his administration's officials with establishment press acquiescence, nonsensically claimed that Syria's biggest problem during the past decade has been ... carbon dioxide. Hardly. According to Cole, CO2 is "a far more deadly gas" than what was used in "the gas attack in Syria on...

"ISIS is the most urgent threat to the West stemming from the Syrian war and must be destroyed." "We may conclude that for Saudi Arabia, defeating the Houthis in Yemen is a more pressing matter than attacking Daesh. The United States and France have been heavily arming the Saudis, who are not bothering to join in the campaign against the most menacing enemy of the West"

A University of Michigan history professor is blaming the Charleston church shooting on “Islamophobia” being spread by “right wing Jews” such as Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes. Professor Juan Cole argues in his blog, Informed Comment, that “far right wing Jews” like Daniel Pipes and Pamela Geller, French politician Marine LePen and Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and “the whole Islamophobic Network” were “a key influence” in Dylann Roof’s shooting of nine people in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, reported Campus Reform. Cole cites Roof’s comments against European immigrants in a manifesto published in the wake...

WHAT THE ISLAMIST-APPEASER BBC OMITTED IN INTERVIEWING JORDANIAN ARAB "KING" Nov-14-2011BBC News Special: Lyse Doucet speaks to King Abdullah of Jordanhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2011/11/111114_king_abdullah_of_jordan_interview.shtml___1) "King" Abdullah of Jordan outrageously said -typically- propagated to BBC that if Israel would have just solved the "Palestinian" problem, it wouldn't had to deal with Iran nukes... that Iran wouldn't want -then- to attack Israel... The BBC Reporter --of course-- "forgot" to press about the clear genocide the Islamic Republic has repeatedly reiterated in 1994 (in Argentina by Iranian official Mohsen Rabbani),[1][2] in 2005 [3][4][5][6] and 2007 [7] (by Ahmadinejad) for Israel to be WIPED OFF, Period. What's...

The BBC is reporting that clashes are continuing into Monday morning between protesters and the regime security forces in Tehran and perhaps other cities, marking the first decisive failure of the basij paramilitary to control the streets by early morning of the day of a big demonstration. The number of protesters allegedly killed by security men rose to 9, with dozens wounded and 300 persons allegedly arrested. This video is allegedly from Monday morning and shows protesters freeing others taken prisoner in a basij van: The chanting on Sunday turned against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself, not just against President Ahmadinejad....

Tenured Radical Goes Global Malcolm A. Kline, October 16, 2009 A professor whom Accuracy in Academia has covered extensively is getting ready to take his act on the road. “Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, produces a steady stream of writings that downplays the threat radical Islam poses to America and the West,” Jonathan Schanzer writes in The American Thinker. “His opinions are at odds with the beliefs of most Americans.” “Now, through a project designed to foster an understanding of America in the Arab world, he appears to be at...

Aug. 3, 2009 | Is Sarah Palin America's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The two differ in many key respects, of course, but it is remarkable how similar they are. There are uncanny parallels in their biographies, their domestic politics and the way they present themselves -- even in their rocky relationships with party elders. Both are former governors of a northwest frontier state with great natural beauty (in Ahmadinejad's case, Ardabil). Both are known for saying things that produce a classic Scooby-Doo double take in their audiences. Both appeal to a sort of wounded nationalism, speaking of the sacrifice of dedicated troops...

Dick Cheney is out there. He is defending torture, dissing Colin Powell, and genuflecting before radio personality Rush Limbaugh as the high priest of what's left of conservatism. His refusal to go quietly, unlike his much-reviled boss, is risky. He was a laugh line more than once at Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner. But the media's focus on the sheer spectacle of the ex-veep's antics, and on the Republican vs. Democrat feud he's stoking, underestimates the way Cheney's principles still inform many of the country's most crucial policies. Like the creatures in the "Alien" films, Cheney has planted some vicious...

Hey Kristof... You're Late! Posted in: Gerald A. Honigman By Gerald A. Honigman Monday, March 23, 2009 While The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof is no stranger to these positions throughout the year, he frequently comes out with his gems of Middle East wisdom right around Bike Week here in Daytona Beach, Florida, when tens of thousands of Harley enthusiasts arrive to also spread their hot air exhaust around town. This year Nick was a few weeks late. Like others of his ilk--Thomas Friedman (better of late), David Ignatius, Richard Cohen, just to name a few, who are also obsessed...

... Like Lawrence Wright’s remarkable “Looming Tower,” published almost three years ago, this field guide to the politics of modern Islam traces the history of the different movements, whose violent offshoots are still morphing into new forms. Along the way, Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, explores what he sees as the twin dynamic of “Islam Anxiety” in the United States and “American Anxiety” in the Arab world. Readers of Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, will find many of the arguments familiar, though they are well assembled here, with essays on the myths surrounding Saudi Wahhabism, the rise of...

When it comes to off-the-wall commentary on the Middle East conflict, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole is the gift that keeps on giving. If there's anti-Israel propaganda to be found, one can be sure Cole will be peddling it at his ironically named blog, Informed Comment. His labeling of Gaza in September, 2007 as "the worst outcome of Western colonialism anywhere in the world outside the Belgian Congo" is a case in point. As noted by Noah Pollack at Contentions, Cole's latest blog ramblings ratchet up the hysteria another notch. Not content with alleging persecution of the self-defeating...

Neoconservatism is an elite calling. It thrives in think tanks, not union halls; its proponents want most of all to influence the powerful. No wonder Ivy League labels have always been important to neocons. This fixation on intellectual prestige explains the recent neocon uprising over the possibility that Juan Cole, scholar and blogger, would become a Yale professor. It was one thing for Cole to hold forth from the University of Michigan, where he has been a professor for twenty years. But Yale would provide "honor" and "imprimatur," says Scott Johnson, a right-wing blogger. "That's a huge thing, to have...

In some ways, the continuing row over his call for the complete destruction of Israel must baffle Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All he did, after all, was to turn up at a routine anti-Zionist event and repeat the standard line—laid down by the Ayatollah Khomeini and thus considered by some to be beyond repeal—that the state of Israel is illegitimate and must be obliterated. There's nothing new in that. In the early '90s, I can remember seeing, in the areas around Baalbek in Lebanon that were dominated by Hezbollah and Amal, large posters of the by-then-late Khomeini embellished (in English)...

Imagine the following paragraph put in print in 1945: "I think it is time to be frank about some things," Cole begins. "George Orwell knows absolutely nothing about the Soviet Union. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on the Soviet Union, much less written one. He knows no Russian. He has never lived in the Soviet Union. He can't read Soviet newspapers or those of the USSR's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Bolshevism, the branch of socialism to which a majority of Russians adheres." I used to get the same cr*p from these creeps...

Juan Cole claims to be a major scholar. He is a tenured professor at the University of Michigan and the president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association. You wouldn't expect such a guy to be so thin-skinned and intellectually insecure. But that's the only conclusion I can draw from his tantrum this weekend. He insists that I'm a nobody, a "maroon," and, of course, an extreme right-wing warmonger. Yawn. All of this sturm and drang was the result of a one-paragraph substantive criticism of his position. I quoted him fairly and accurately, which he does not deny and which...

Who is the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani? The most important Shiite cleric in Iraq, a nation that is 60 percent Shiite. This means the reclusive 73-year-old leader wields a tremendous degree of influence over the nation’s future, experts say. What are his views on postwar Iraq? Sistani has tacitly supported the U.S. occupation of Iraq and wants the members of Iraq’s transitional and permanent governments—as well as the framers of a new Iraqi constitution—chosen through direct elections. He also wants Iraq to be an Islamic state. This concerns U.S. policymakers, who would prefer a secular Iraq. “If Sistani gets everything...

Furor erupts over Web site monitoring of Middle Eastern scholars By RON TODT The Associated Press 9/27/02 10:22 PM PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A pro-Israel organization has set up a Web site to monitor professors and universities for pro-Arab, anti-Israel bias -- a move some academics are decrying as campus McCarthyism and attempted intimidation. The Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum said it organized the Campus Watch site to counter pervasive bias in universities' Middle Eastern studies. The site names schools and specific professors. Forum director Daniel Pipes said the think tank hopes eventually to monitor 250 North American academic institutions. "Our goal...